Best way to build a hierarchy CLI menu?

Question

I want to build a command line interface with menus and sub-menus and eventually the leafs of the tree should be operations like.. bank management -> account management -> add acount (insert account info) And I'm looking for a good way which works with the OO principles...

Thanks for any piece of advice!

• ratchet freak: navigating a CLI can be seen as traversing a state machine, with each state a menu and the edges the commands at each menu
• aclowkay: yeah..but should do it with a while loop? or what..im stuck with it
• aclowkay: I tried making a "menunude" abstract class which has the sub classes menu and operation..menu has a list of menus and operation has an execute function which does whatever it's supposed to do...the problem is what to put in the main thingy

Answer 1

if you want OO I suggest a Menu interface with methods to write out the options and parsing the input and returning the next Menu

so your main loop becomes:

Menu menu = new StartMenu();
 while(menu.isExit){
 menu.writeOptions(stdOut);
 Menu res = menu.parseInput(stdIn.readline());
 if(res==null)
 writeError(stdOut);
 else
 menu=res;
}

• aclowkay: But what If I want to encapsulate the whole loop inside a seperate menu class,How should I do that?
• Ben313: You could put this code inside a static method in the base class if you really wanted to. Call it RunMenu().